What furniture showed me about newcomer integration

I was recently in Brussels to attend the Social Innovation for Refugee Inclusion conference. It It was excellent, with an inspiring mix of international perspectives and novel ways of framing and approaching the challenges of migration.

The only real drawback for me was the location. We were the kind of committee auditorium where both speakers at the front and the audience in rows are sat behind a high desk with a microphone, a headset and a little screen. Whoever is speaking — including questions from the audience — is simultaneously shown on everybody’s screen and translated through the headset by interpreters sitting in cabins.

The upshot is this weird sense of disconnection. When I was speaking I could see most people’s heads, but mostly they were hidden behind all their desks and apparatus, and I couldn’t make much eye contact because a lot of people were watching me on their screens. It was very hard to get a sense of how what I was saying was going down with the audience, an whether I needed to adjust my speed or the depth of my explanations. The same was true when other people were speaking: I felt much less connected to them and couldn’t listen as well to what they were saying.

It got me thinking about how the way physical spaces are designed can profoundly shape the kind of experiences people can have there. Obviously, the architects of this building weren’t actively trying to inhibit personal connection. But they inadvertently did so because they were focussing so hard on something else that the room had to achieve, namely that whoever is speaking must be visible, and comprehensible, to anybody else in the room, regardless of language.

In systems-speak this is an example of a constraint on a system, and of how following it can seriously affect the behaviour of the entire system.

When we’re talking about the challenges of integration and inclusion of newcomers in European societies, we’re dealing with massive complexity — countless systems interwoven and nestled in one another. And sure enough, sometimes this kind of constraint can have an unintended and significant influence on outcomes — not necessarily negative, but often subtle and hard to see. Let me give three examples I’ve encountered.

Firstly, a number of civic tech projects were set up with the aim of providing education and training to refugees and connect them to employers, the hope being that they can work towards a high-skilled, highly paid job. However, one constraint which many refugees arriving into Europe were operating under was pressure to earn an income immediately in order to send remittances to their families in their home countries. This meant many people who might have benefitted from such projects instead took low-paid or informal work.

Secondly, I was talking recently to a French civic tech project aiming to provide skills training to refugees, and they told me how the principle of equality enshrined in the French constitution and laws placed a constraint on them by forbidding them to offer services to a particular group (i.e. refugees) to the exclusion of all others. Instead, they developed a programme that could benefit a range of disadvantaged groups: not just newcomers, but also the long-term unemployed and others. Of course, this had huge effects about how they approached almost every part of their work.

Thirdly, in Germany there are a handful of very large “welfare organizations” (Wohlfahrtsverbände), which play a central role in providing government-funded social services, from refugee support to care of the elderly, and so on. But the ability of these organisations to adapt and innovate in their work is constrained by German labour law (as well as institutional culture) that make it very difficult for them to let staff go who might be surplus to requirements. This means they have a strong incentive to design social services in a way that provides employment to their existing workforce. Looking at the trajectory of attempted innovation in this field in Germany over the past few years, I believe this to be an important factor: the structural inflexibility of some key players.

I often find that thinking in such systemic terms leads to rather humbling conclusions, in that you realise that there isn’t really a solution as such to complex social challenges, just systems that move this way and that. But there is an optimistic way of looking at it too: namely that if we do the work to understand the workings of the system in their true complexity, then relatively small and seemingly indirect changes could have a really big impact.